I hope that this thread goes in this section. If not, I am really sorry.

In addition, anybody who thinks that 8/9 strings are for ******s and/or wannabees or whatever shouldn't even had opened this thread in the first place. If you don't have anything useful to say, please, stay out of this thread. We all understand that you're a traditional Clapton Style blues player, but some of us want to have a range from a down tuned bass to an ukulele in a single instrument, and because we don't know how to play a piano, we want a guitar with 9 strings. Thank you for your understanding

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I am searching for a cheap 8/9 string guitar ( prefer 9 strings ) . I am very well aware of the fact that every non-standard guitar is pretty expensive, and that even 7 strings cost a lot because they are not considered " standard ", but is there any 9 string guitar that is not really expensive, yet playable ?

I prefer NOT having a multiscale neck if possible, but I wouldn't mind one either.

Yup -- check the www.rondomusic.com site to see what they've got available. The www.agileguitars.org site will make a bit more sense and tell you what the various models seem to have been and how they're differentiated, but Rondo itself doesn't maintain everything in stock; sometimes you have to wait for a new containerload to show up in New Hampshire and find its way onto the site. They have 8, 9 and even 10 string guitars (some multiscale, some not), some even with trems!

I hope that this thread goes in this section. If not, I am really sorry.

In addition, anybody who thinks that 8/9 strings are for ******s and/or wannabees or whatever shouldn't even had opened this thread in the first place. If you don't have anything useful to say, please, stay out of this thread. We all understand that you're a traditional Clapton Style blues player, but some of us want to have a range from a down tuned bass to an ukulele in a single instrument, and because we don't know how to play a piano, we want a guitar with 9 strings. Thank you for your understanding

____

I am searching for a cheap 8/9 string guitar ( prefer 9 strings ) . I am very well aware of the fact that every non-standard guitar is pretty expensive, and that even 7 strings cost a lot because they are not considered " standard ", but is there any 9 string guitar that is not really expensive, yet playable ?

I prefer NOT having a multiscale neck if possible, but I wouldn't mind one either.

Any suggestions?

You obviously have issues with those types of guitars with a needless rant like that.

Personnal opinion here but I can't conceive 9 and 10 strings that are NON-multiscale and sound right on each string. Even for 8 I would reccomend multiscale or simply have an enourmous scale and some weird string gauge.. Agile makes some cheap and nice 8-9-10 strings as been said

Personnal opinion here but I can't conceive 9 and 10 strings that are NON-multiscale and sound right on each string. Even for 8 I would reccomend multiscale or simply have an enourmous scale and some weird string gauge.. Agile makes some cheap and nice 8-9-10 strings as been said

Surprisingly (to me, anyway), multiscale guitars actually seem to be *easier* to play in some respects. Your hand just naturally seems to angle into those positions, and it seems like a no-brainer ergonomic design once you've spent some time with them.

The longer-scale guitars sound fine (but you're up in 28 and 30" scale territory), but bending leads on a 30" scale guitar is just NOT the same <G>. When you get into that many strings, even the multiscales don't make a big difference, because you can't necessarily get the same angle on the frets due to the width of the fretboards.

One comment on this; I've got a Variax, so I tried extending the (six-string) scale by simply retuning the guitar (no tension change necessary -- it's all electronically done). You can actually get a similar distance from top to bottom as an 8-string ordinarily provides by tuning something more like fifths than fourths. Better have long hands down in the cowboy chord area, and you have to relearn scales, etc., but it's amazing what you can do. I would imagine that actually selecting string gauges appropriately on a 25.5" scale would do wonders.

How do the high end ($800) septor/interceptor Agile's compare to LTD's and Ibanez's in a similar and higher price range?

Easily better. Consider the marketing model. With LTDs and Ibanez', you're buying from a brick and mortar or from an online entity who buys from the importer, who made a profit on bringing the guitar into the county by selling to the brick and mortar or the online store.

With Rondo, Kurt is both the importer and the retailer and he has next to no additional expenses as a retailer (no customer location, no employees, no airconditioning, no rent, no fancy catalogs or advertising (aside from the crappy website and eBay sales), no endorsement deals, no inventory issues due to pilferage or shop wear, etc.

If you buy an $800 Ibanez in a store, you're paying nearly half of that for the store/corporate entity's expenses. They likely paid $400 for it (give or take). So it's a guitar that the importer (Ibanez) paid to have built and shipped over, and they make a profit off of that. Perhaps their expenses total are $200 for the guitar and they've made $200 profit. The manufacturer solid it for $200 FOB and his labor and materials were probably less than $100. I've spent enough time at NAMM over the years to know that an Asian guitar's sale price at retail is marked up 6-10X over what the importer pays for the guitar, so while the percentages along the way may vary, those are the averages.

Rondo's pricing is less than retail sale, a bit over what he pays as an importer. Generally speaking, you'll get a significantly better guitar at the same price that you'd pay for an Ibanez or LTD.